All Souls Day: A great teacher remembered

I try annually on the Feast of All Souls/Dia de los Muertos to write a remembrance of someone that I knew whose days among the living have ended. One of the truths of aging is that each of us accumulates more and more such persons; our personal cloud of witnesses grows with our years.

Today I want to remember Susan R. Schapiro, 1930-2011.

"Mrs. Schapiro," as I will always think of her, taught me first high school geometry and then an elective course she had designed herself, called "Problems of Democracy." The latter was considered by my traditional girls school very difficult, obscure, and perhaps slightly subversive, suitable only for particularly ambitious seniors. I somehow talked myself into it a year early. It was my only experience in high school of delighted intellectual engagement.

She seemed very different from the rest of our teachers, though I couldn't have said exactly how until the internet allowed me to research her background much later in life. Like most of the student body, she came out of comfortable upper middle class Buffalo; like about 20 percent of the students, she was Jewish rather than white-bread Protestant, but certainly not therefore unconventional. I remember baby-sitting once for her new born infant daughter; her household seemed just like every other one of our class, with perhaps a few more books.

She had graduated from the school in the late 1940s; my mother remembered her from Mother's stint as the librarian. She went on to Mills College in California, something of an unlikely destination for a Buffalonian of her generation. After college she attended Harvard Law School, a member of only the second class there that included women. She left after one year, returned to Buffalo, and gradually created an unconventional teaching path that I suspect, in distant hindsight, was always somewhat disturbing to the institutions where she practiced her craft. Somehow she endured and rose above the stifling intellectual conformity and conservatism of the 1950s in a gray provincial city.

And what was Mrs. Schapiro's craft? She sought to elicit from students (and if necessary rigorously demand of us) that we engage with texts, understand their implications, and think critically for ourselves about them. What were her texts? Everything from the prophet Samuel's admonition to the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible to beware of kings to the Jewish, pacifist, democratic socialist credo of Albert Einstein. Oh, and all those difficult great thinkers in between -- Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, Jefferson, Lincoln ... Yes, her canon as I encountered in it the early 1960s was woefully short of women and people of color. It was of its time. She was endlessly capable of looking for new thoughts -- and insisted on interrogating her own discoveries.

When the local elite boys high school went co-ed sometime after I left Buffalo forever in 1969, she took her course there. I always had a suspicion there was something uncomfortable about that lateral leap. There she created a Department of Philosophy, Religion and Social Relations whose offerings included "Afro-American Literature,” the “Literature of Identity” and “Existentialism in Literature.” Too bad I missed out on those offerings! By the 1980s, she'd gone back to school herself, earning a doctorate at age 61 and joined the faculty at the University of Buffalo, creating the Methods of Inquiry Program, teaching critical thinking skills to students with relatively low test scores and high school grades. In the 1990s, I remember hearing that Mrs. Schapiro was offering adult philosophy courses at the urban church, Trinity Episcopal, where I was raised.

Mrs. Schapiro lived to teach people to think. What could be more honorable?